Twenty-fourth February 2022: the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a dramatic event that suddenly enters everyone’s daily life. A conflict that has deep roots. A story told by the journalist Alessandro Cassieri in the book ‘Between Russia and Ukraine – Diary of the conflict from its origins to today’ for Rai Libri. Cassieri, a long-time journalist, as a Rai correspondent witnessed crucial events, crises and wars in over eighty countries, including Ukraine. “Are you going to Kiev for the independence referendum?”: it was 1991 when Cassieri received a phone call while he was in Libya waiting for an exclusive interview with Gaddafi. Thus begins Cassieri’s story, which is intertwined with many characters and events experienced, as a journalist, firsthand by the author.
The book is an intense first-person story, adventurous and at times daring. Cassieri moves along the Moscow-Kiev axis, crossing an increasingly armed border dozens of times. But the signs of new conflicts also push him to Ossetia and Georgia, Crimea and Donbass, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan, America and China, before returning to the Ukrainian hotbed. During his travels in those vast territories he meets heads of state, spies, soldiers and political leaders who will decide the fate of the Region. From Gorbachev to Putin, from William Colby to Shevardnadze, from Vernon Walters to Saakashvili, from Medvedev to Yulia Tymoshenko, from Poroshenko to Yanukovych, to Pushilin, to Massoud, with the accompanying oligarchs and dancers, chess champions and boxers, writers, gamblers and ordinary people, whose lives are overwhelmed by the consequences of a geopolitics that has never been so invasive in Europe since the end of the Second World War.
From all of them Cassieri collects testimonies, invectives, fears, threats, which compose the historical and social picture of a world in which the epochal match between great powers is being played. A challenge that brought the Cold War climate back to the heart of Europe.
Cassieri, appointed special correspondent in 1991 for his services on the collapse of the USSR, correspondent from Brussels and Moscow and then special correspondent for Tg1 until 2016, when he became head of the Rai office in Paris, returned to Tg1 and returned to the correspondent, the form of journalism, the ‘in the field’ one, which he has always preferred. He made several trips as an envoy to Donbass, the eastern region of Ukraine at war since 2014 and the front line of fire in this phase of the conflict.
“With binoculars it is possible to identify, in the plain that dominates the landscape, the areas where the Ukrainian soldiers are quartered. You can spy the horizon from slits dug under the ice. The underground walkways extend for about a hundred metres. Every now and then a sign that says ‘beware of snipers’. There are also a couple of deeper holes. ‘We call these fox dens, we take refuge under here during the bombings’ explains a soldier. He is young, just as his fellow soldiers are very young. But I will also meet senior officers, who have governed these local troops since the beginning, since 2014. In the tiny underground room, adjacent to the dormitory with about ten cots, there hangs an old painting, now faded, dedicated to the battle of Stalingrad”.
A war, the one in Ukraine, which cannot be classified as a regional conflict, as Cassieri writes: “With the old taboos of the Cold War having been broken, and in the presence of new and fearful alliances, Europe risks becoming the battlefield in which the balance of power of the 21st century will be decided”.